I love the yellow version too but I think Sir Ridley was right when he asked for a colour change... Not sure the yellow would have sticked to the general mood of the film, it has a kind of THUNDERBIRD look that's so odd...

Fred

PS : It also makes me think of the Beatles, but instead of singing "we all live in the yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine" it would have been "we all die in the yellow Nostromo, yellow Nostromo, yellow Nostromo" !

the really cool thing about the shot here is if you look in the distance to the left out Ash's blister, you can see the VTOL / jump jet thruster drooping down
What a cool shot here Fred. The only thing out of perspective is the rear strut should be way further back where on could see it if leaned way forward in the blister, then they could see it. But this was done to make this scene more visual....Very cool pic here!

Wow - the blister's a long way from the landing leg on the model. So where does the lift/elevator go?

It would be cool to replace the blister with a clear acrylic version and light it.

I noticed, also the legs in the Blister shot are too close together.. In real perspective they would be 100s' of feet apart, probably would not even see the other legs in the blowing wind and ice...but it looks cool..
The lift and the airlock are just forward about 15 meters from the front strut.

Jon Sorenson gave me a personal message to everyone here to keep the flag of the original ALIEN flying!

I noticed, also the legs in the Blister shot are too close together.. In real perspective they would be 100s' of feet apart, probably would not even see the other legs in the blowing wind and ice...but it looks cool..

Yeah, that's something that confused me the first time I saw the Nostromo model. It surprised me that it had only three landing legs as I'd assumed from the exterior shots that there was a lot more going on under the ship - multiple landing legs, lifts etc since you could see so much in that relatively small area. (You need to remember that this was a first impression way back when I'd only seen the movie once or twice!)

Where would I find the letrasets? I'm gonna need a few of those cross circle thingies.

Any serious art store should have them. Usually those cross markers are crop marks left over from the transfer process. But I think they used to make entire sheets of crop markings and the such for drafting. They're easily transferred to just about any surface with a burnishing tool that has a little ball roller on one end. Just be careful with them, they are very delicate even transferring onto paper, let alone painted plastic/resin

I've got a drawer full of those old sheets somewhere in my materials closet, I'll let you know if I find any that have the cross markings on them. Modern computer printing has kind of killed off that form of typesetting._________________

Well I didn't find any with the cross markers. Quite a few with the '>>' markings from the esper photos. I did however turn up one set of transfers from a different manufacturer that had an interesting design on them:

I might scan these into Illustrator and turn them into vector shapes._________________

Since I have an extensive collection of Letraset characters I can assure you that I've never seen an entire sheet of those markers. They're simply used to keep the transfer of letters parallel (or straight) to your work. Another trick I use (with much success) is simply tranfering the lettraset onto a piece of clear tape and then applying that tape (with the letters/design) on the model...that way you can basically transfer anything to any kind of surface with ease (try to transfer lettraset on a vertical/fragile surface: good luck!)